Quyllur - Astrophotography Lightroom presets

These Lightroom Classic presets are for landscape astrophotography and they aren't your typical one-click presets.

By using these tools you'll be able to create a custom workflow to use on your pictures, that way you can create a personal editing style. If you don't know where to start with photo editing, these tools are ideal for you since you will be able to follow the same workflow I use, but at the same time you can develop a personal style by using the presets.

Personal workflow

There are two kind of presets, global and local. The following workflow is needed in order for them to function properly.

Global adjustments

1 - Lens correction: it is very common to use a wide angle lenses when doing landscape astrophotography, this type of lens usually creates vignetting, that's why the first step on the workflow is correcting that issue along with the distortions, so the following presets will work without any issue.

2 - White balance: you can choose a color temperature and tint based on the Moon phase or you can do it manually by using a technique that never fails (it is explained in the video that comes with the presets).

3 - Color correction: with this preset you will get a correct base exposure, contrast and saturation for your image, that can later be adjusted if needed (keep in mind this isn't the same as color grading, that's the next step).

4 - Color grading: once you've made basic adjustments to your image you can start working on the colors, this will help you create different colourful, desaturated, silvery or black and white styles.

In this gallery you can check and compare on the same picture the different options you will get with the base presets:

5 - Noise reduction and sharpness: you can apply noise reduction and sharpness to your image, this will help to get rid of the typical grain on digital photography caused by long exposures and high ISO, but maintaining great level of sharpness and detail on the picture.

Local adjustments

With these tools you can vastly improve your pictures after using the global adjustments since these only affect a specific part of the image. There are different tools for achieving this:

A - Milky Way booster: with just an adjustment brush you can boost the Milky Way to make it look better, but you need to be careful with this to avoid an overly contrasted galaxy.

B - Enhance foreground: this preset will let you brighten a dark area. This is useful for foregrounds so you can recover information and show more detail that otherwise wouldn't be visible.

C - Highlight star: by using this adjustment brush you can highlight the brightest stars on the sky, or maybe use the tool to stand out a constellation, for example.

D - Darken sky: sometimes after editing a picture the sky doesn't appear too dark. With this tool you can darken the sky so the stars will stand out a bit more against a darker sky.

E - Reduce light pollution: light pollution is the worst astrophotography enemy. Sometimes we can't avoid it, but we can reduce it in post production with this local adjustment.

F - Attenuate stars: during summer on the southern hemisphere we see the less interesting part of the Milky Way, that has less stars than the core. For those kind of pictures we can use this tool to reduce the amount of stars that are around the galaxy to make it stand out a bit more.

G - Vignette: this local adjustment will create a much more flexible vignette than the tool available in Lightroom under Effects, because we can move this and put it wherever we want and make it as dark as we need to.

H - Hide noise: there are certain cameras that introduce lots of digital noise into the pictures and maybe they'll have irrelevant information in a specific area. Thanks to this local adjustment we can hide the noise and help center the attention on the parts of the image that really matter.

Notes

The presets work on Lightroom Classic v7.3 and up. To check your installed version go to Help > About Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, as shown in this picture

The presets only work with raw files or DNG converted from a raw file (if you are doing astrophotography you shouldn't be shooting JPEG)

The presets can be modified to suit your needs for every single picture

You must use them by following the steps indicated above to get good results

Along with the presets there's a document, an installer and an instructional video that shows how to install the presets and use them correctly to get the most out of them (please note the video is currently in Spanish only, the PDF document is in English)